"These hard, powerful, brilliantly resourceful sea masters had to sleep occasionally, and therefore found it necessary to surround themselves with super-loyal, muscular but dull-brained illiterates who could not see nor savvy their masters’ stratagems. There was great safety in the mental dullness of these henchmen. The Great Pirates realized that the only people who could possibly contrive to displace them were the truly bright people. For this reason their number-one strategy was secrecy. If the other powerful pirates did not know where you were going, nor when you had gone, nor when you were coming back, they would not know how to waylay you. If anyone knew when you were coming home, “small-timers” could come out in small boats and waylay you in the dark and take you over–just before you got home tiredly after a two-year treasure-harvesting voyage. Thus hijacking and second-rate piracy became a popular activity around the world’s shores and harbors. Thus secrecy became the essence of the lives of the successful pirates; ergo, how little is known today of that which I am relating."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969) p. 23
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Elite
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Elite
11 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Elite →
Related Quotes
"The State is a political abstraction, a hierarchical institution by which a privileged elite strives to dominate the …"
"The institution of Capitalist property, moreover, permits a minority of the population to control and to regulate acc…"
"But there were a few human beings who gradually, through the process of invention and experiment, built and operated,…"
"It is better to be a total failure in democracy than a martyr or the crème de la crème in tyranny."
"The whole notion of the free market, laissez-faire capitalism, globalization is a very thin rationale for unmitigated…"
"People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to …"
"More and more, I tune out when I see the word "elites," regarding it as a lazy Marxist slur, from both Left and Right…"
"I came to understand how organized governments used their concentrated power to retard progress by their ever-ready m…"
"The practice of democracy has the notorious tendency to become paradoxical. It begins in the name of the "demos" but …"
"We should be alarmed when members of the ruling class start pleading with us to take sides with them against the 'eli…"